Monday, 5 October 2009

Inglourious Basterds [2009]

Quentin Tarantino’s seventh feature direction (sixth if you consider the two Kill Bill volumes as a single movie) is a riotous and rambunctious rampage; there isn’t an iota of exaggeration in that! Inglourious Basterds (the title has been deliberately misspelt) recounts parallel attempts to assassinate the top brass of the German leadership, including Adolf Hitler, during WWII, while they are watching a movie at a theatre in German-occupied France – on one hand by a group of hilariously comical American-Jews called the Basterds who love to kick Nazi-ass, and on the other by the owner of the theatre, a Jewish girl, whose parents were executed by the Nazis. The movie is at once, an audacious and a provocative chronicle of an alternate WWII history where the Nazis face a reversal of fate vis-à-vis the Holocaust, an effective genre-spoof (some have even called it a spaghetti war movie), and the kind of wildly entertaining ride that can best be called Tarantino-an. The acting is memorable throughout, especially that of Brad Pitt as the gleefully over-the-top leader of the Basterds, and Christopher Waltz as an unctuous, sinister and silver-tongued Nazi ‘Jew Hunter’. However, the only flaw, as I remarked to a wonderful analysis of the movie by a fellow blogger, is that, despite some brilliant individual episodes, sum of the parts somehow failed to add up to the intended whole.

4 comments:

I agree with you assessment, but I would say that I probably found it even more hit or miss than you. There were a few select sequences that I really liked and I thought that Brad Pitt was the highlight of the entire film, but on the whole I thought that it was middle of the pack Tarantino.

Yeah, same here. In fact this film has reasonably polarized the viewers. But the question remains, what constitutes the bottom of Tarantino's pack, cos I can't find any? His movies are either brilliant or at least good enough to be called well above average.